The 17th London Korean Film Festival did not get off to the happiest start, not owing to anything with the event itself, but because of what had happened over 5000 miles away just a few days before.

The horrific crowd crush at Itaewon, one of South Korea’s worst-ever disasters, weighed heavily over the opening night of an event meant to celebrate the best of the nation’s film industry. The post-screening reception had already been cancelled, and the audience were asked to join in a moment of silence for the tragedy’s victims.

After this sombre beginning, festival-goers were badly in need of some escapism – the opening film, Alienoid, certainly delivered. With director Choi Dong-Hoon inspired by the likes of Back to the Future, laughter quickly filled the auditorium as viewers were plunged into a world of sci-fi, magic and slapstick comedy.

The plot, which involved aliens being imprisoned in human bodies, was insane yet strangely enjoyable, and was made surprisingly heartwarming by robots Guard and Thunder (both played by Kim Woo-bin) and their human ‘daughter’ Ean (Kim Tae-ri, best known for Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden) who they rescued/kidnapped as a baby in 14th century Korea. Come for the cool fight sequences, stay for the ass-kicking young woman raised by her two dysfunctional robot dads.

In fact, parenthood in all its messy, infuriating glory became an extremely common theme throughout the festival. Case in point: Kwon Soo-Kyung’s Stellar: A Magical Ride, in which debt collector Yeong-bae (Son Ho-jun) finds himself rattling around in his recently-deceased estranged father’s ancient Hyundai Stellar, chasing a drug-filled Lamborghini while himself being chased by its disgruntled criminal owners. Oh, and his girlfriend is pregnant and the Stellar is almost certainly possessed by his dad’s spirit, providing a surprisingly hardy emotional core amidst the tornado of black comedy.

Meanwhile, those who prefer the catharsis of horror might have preferred Kang Dong-hun’s Contorted. Drawing on everything from Greek tragedy to Kubrick’s The Shining, Contorted sees a troubled family move into a suspiciously cheap rural house. Jumpscares go bump in the night, the architecture doesn’t make sense, and you really, really don’t want to know what’s lurking in the padlocked shed… Starring a spine-chilling performance from Seo Young-hee, Contorted explores psychosis, intergenerational trauma and the worst things adults are capable of doing to their children.

Alongside parenthood, viewers experienced a variety of insights into the experiences of Korean women and girls. Some of these came from the festival’s own brand of time travel: a look back at the career of one of Korean cinema’s most acclaimed actresses, Kang Soo-yeon, following her untimely passing earlier this year at the age of 55. Clearly feeling that a tribute was long overdue, the LKFF put together a quintet of her best roles.

One of these was in Im Sang-soo’s Girls’ Night Out (1998) which stars Kang, Jin Hee-kyung and Kim Yeo-jin as flatsharing gal pals Ho-jeong, Yeon and Soon – all refreshingly complex and fully-realised characters with careers, hobbies and, yes, messy relationships. Sexual fantasies, masturbation, sex toys and sex itself are all discussed openly and frankly: at one point, Ho-jeong turns to Yeon and asks, “What do you think about your vagina?” Yeon later breaks her arm trying to get a better look at said vagina and if that hasn’t convinced you to watch this film, surely nothing else will. Unfortunately Im Kwon-taek’s Come Come Come Upward (1989), in which Kang plays a troubled Buddhist nun, was a much less positive viewing experience. While Kang’s acting is indeed superb, unfortunately Male Filmmaker Syndrome strikes again as without warning the film shoves in not one, but two sudden and gratuitously violent rape scenes, one of which is followed by Kang’s character happily settling down to start a family with the rapist.

Thankfully another of the programme’s highlights took a very different approach to sexual violence. The debut feature of writer and director Kim Jung-eun, Gyeong-ah’s Daughter stars Kim Jung-young as the titular Gyeong-ah and Ha Yoon-kyung as her daughter Yeon-su, whose life falls apart when her ex posts a sexually explicit video of her online. Strikingly, in the film’s evenly paced but never boring narrative, Kim Jung-eun refuses to focus on the perpetrator for one second longer than she absolutely has to.

Instead, the focus is entirely on the impact his revenge porn has on Yeon-su’s life and mental health – and on her relationship with her mother. Powered by excellent performances from both actors, Gyeong-ah’s Daughter is a bold yet understated examination of how women can both suffer under and uphold patriarchal cultures. But it’s also a powerful reminder of how strong we can be and of, despite patriarchy’s best efforts, our capacity for survival.

However, the best female-centric entry on the programme was The Hill of Secrets, itself the feature debut of writer and director Lee Ji-eun and part of this year’s Generation Kplus selection at the Berlin International Film Festival. Perfect for fans of Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman, the film follows 12-year-old Myung-eun (Moon Seung-ah), a zealous fifth-grader who’s desperate to please her kind-hearted teacher and embarrassed by her seemingly uncaring parents.

As time goes on she struggles to keep her home life separate from her heavily curated school persona, and learns valuable lessons about not judging books by their covers, and the importance of authentic self-expression. Bringing the festival back down to earth after the surreal madness of Alienoid and Stellar, Lee’s creation is a gentle, stripped-back and often painfully authentic coming-of-age story, anchored by a truly superb performance from its young star.

The above, of course, is just a thin slice of the many features and short films that made up the London Korean Film Festival’s programme this year. Crime dramas, romances, films about filmmaking, groundbreaking queer documentaries – the list goes on. But one thing uniting many of these films is that they leave you with at least the tiniest kernel of hope, if not for the future then at least for humanity’s ability to survive, create, laugh and love, no matter what comes next. (Except for Contorted because, let’s be honest, you’d never survive that house.) And between the collective trauma of Itaewon, and the brutal cost-of-living crisis unfolding here in the UK, we could all use a little extra faith in humanity right now.

In North Korea at the tail-end of World War Two, a baby girl was born to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. The latter had travelled to Pyongyang to be with her lover during the Japanese occupation of Korea, but left upon giving him their daughter. She returned to Tokyo alone.

The baby grew and became a mother herself, bringing Noh Young Sun into the world, an experimental filmmaker and documentarian who now lives and works in France. Ahead of a Q&A screening of her deeply personal debut feature, Yukiko, at the London Korean Film Festival this month, Noh spoke to LWLies about the immediate challenge posed by tracing her elusive lineage. “When my mother spoke about my grandmother for the first time, she referred to her as ‘The Woman’,” she says. “They were strangers to each other.”

Noh only discovered her grandmother’s identity eight years ago, when her mother eventually revealed the story of her birth. “I was very shocked to learn that my grandmother was Japanese,” she recalls, “and I was shocked that I didn’t know a huge part of my mother’s life. I pictured my mother and my grandmother on two separate islands, both isolated from each other. Two islands, two women.”

‘Yukiko’ came as a suggested name for Noh’s grandmother as she had no official documentation or record of her existence. It was like trying to pinpoint a ghost. “I started my research but I couldn’t find any photos of her,” Noh explains, “I couldn’t find anyone who knew her. I couldn’t catch this character. I couldn’t see her. She’s invisible in this movie.”

Instead, Noh built an imagined picture of her grandmother through interviews with several women who had seen war first-hand, or who had grown old in the way that she believed Yukiko might have, and of course through conversations with her own mother.

She brought on a musician as her sound designer, and used ambient or diegetic sound to set the film’s pace and mood, filling long shots of rural landscapes with the swish of windscreen wipers or a worker hacking through long grass. “Sound was very important to me,” she says, “I wanted to work with sound to create musicality. When I’m telling my story, it’s not just the words – there’s words in the music, and music means emotion to me.”

As an intergenerational story about strangers, Yukiko ultimately offers more questions than answers. But herein lies its purpose: it is a journey of acceptance over the promise of a grand reveal. “What has really changed through making this film is my relationship with my mother,” Noh reflects. “We had a very complicated relationship, but I realised that I was accepting my mother in the way that my mother never accepted my grandmother. And in accepting my mother I was accepting myself as a daughter.”

Yukiko screens at the LKFF on 11 November. For more info visit koreanfilm.co.uk

That sound you can hear is the South Korean filmmaking boom, still echoing around the globe. For lovers of cinema that’s politically engaged, formally challenging and still in its relative infancy, the annual London Korean Film Festival offers a bounty of exciting options. This year’s celebration is the most expansive and diverse yet, folding sidebars on shorts, animation and artist film into the main core of new and archive feature work.

Festivities kick off with the European premiere of Jeon Go-woon’s Microhabitat, about a woman on the cusp of penury who decides to reconnect with the members of her long-defunct band. Malene Choi’s The Return, looking at Korean diaspora while fusing elements of fact and fiction, closes out the festival, but here are some of the great things happening in between…

1. Special Focus: A Slice of Everyday Life

Often when we think of South Korean cinema, images of byzantine revenge plots, crunching violence and chilling horrors spring to mind. A Slice of Everyday Life is a major strand at this year’s LKFF, and through its immaculately curated programme of realist treasures, it looks set to challenge those preconceptions. There’s a rare chance to catch Hong Sang-soo’s brilliant second feature, The Power of Kangwon Province, from 1998, in which the always-interesting director forges the template for career obsessions, notably the humiliations that come with love and excessive alcohol consumption.

Innocence and purity abounds in So-Young Kim’s Treeless Mountain, a tender, child’s eye view of the harsh Korean landscape as seen from the vantage of two knee-high tots. Conversely, violence is the sole constant of the everyday life in Yang Ik-june’s pulverising Breathless, in which the writer-director (who will be present at the festival) plays a loan shark who perpetually gravitates towards confrontation. Other treats include Kim Yang-hee’s The Poet and the Boy and Moon So-ri’s The Running Actress, both receiving their European premieres within the strand, while Park Jungbum will be present with two films at the festival: 2010’s The Journals of Musan and 2015’s Alive.

2. Indie Firepower

Often, film festivals operate as a vital way to catch up with new works by established directors who have not quite found their way onto the international distribution circuit. Park Ki-yong is one such talent, who has over the span of two decades, amassed a small but perfectly formed cinematic oeuvre. The 2018 LKFF is offering patrons a chance to see Park’s most recent work, Old Love, but to also catch up with two of his early features, 1997’s Motel Cactus and 2001’s Camel(s).

Those early films cover subjects of sex, boredom and disenchantment, and his new one – made after a hiatus running various film schools and making documentaries – offers a wry auto-commentary on the filmmaker he once was. So our advice: make sure you see all three of these films for the full-power Park experience.

3. Contemporary Classics: Lee Myung-se & The 1990s

Leap on this chance to catch the extremely rare early works of director Lee Myung-se. Lee will likely be known to UK audiences for his 1999 action- thriller, Nowhere to Run, but he started out as a maker of very sweet, lightly sentimental and opulently designed romantic comedies.

1990’s My Love, My Bride examines the troubles encountered by a pair of young newlyweds in accepting their newfound coupledom, while 1993’s First Love is something of a lost classic – a proto Amélie which taps into the dreams and desires of a romantically smitten female high schooler. Their Last Love Affair, from 1995, closed out this brief but fruitful early career chapter, as Lee picks apart the moral and emotional questions that come from marital infidelity

The London Korean Film Festival runs from November 1-25. For more information and tickets visit koreanfilm.co.uk